


Other Worlds Than These

by frodo (ringbearer)



Series: Red Ribbon [3]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, CSA, Dark fic, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Physical Abuse, Rape, Sexual Abuse, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:41:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22134223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ringbearer/pseuds/frodo
Summary: Ben Solo meets Rey two years after he's sold to the Scavengers by his mother to keep him safe. It is simultaneously the best and worst thing to happen to him.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: Red Ribbon [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1582738
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	Other Worlds Than These

**Author's Note:**

> this took SO LONG to write and i'm only...partially happy with how it turned out, but hopefully it's a good enough first chapter people will be intrigued by it.
> 
> also i was inspired for part of this by this fic's first chapter: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20821541

Rey’s footsteps echoed only slightly as she padded down the long dark duracrete hall lined by closed doors headed to the washroom of the Scavengers’ hideout. It was her turn to do the laundry and under one arm she held a wicker basket, far too large for her small frame to carry, full of filthy clothes belonging to not only the Scavengers, but the slave children that lived within the hideout as well.

The Scavengers were having guests of a neighboring gang over that night. Everyone’s clothes had to be clean. It was her job to make sure they were.

Scavenging was the only trade of any real value to the citizens of Jakku. Jakku itself wasn’t known for being much more than a junkyard planet covered in sand. It was full of rotting star destroyers, crumbling ATATs, and rusting speeders. There were various other items scattered about the desert landscape as well: old transports, weapons, and droids, and every single one of them was a potential valuable to those who inhabited the forgotten planet. Scavenging didn’t earn the citizens any money. Money wasn’t something used on the planet. But trading scavenged parts for food, shelter, and clothing was not an uncommon practice. And everyone did it. As a result, no one was what one might call rich or poor, but there was still plenty of crime on Jakku. The rich were gangs who monopolized every aspect of life on Jakku. The poor were everyone else.

Like many of the planets in the galaxy, the poor individuals were clustered closer to the small towns and the rich were scattered around it. Those individuals, in this case, were the gangs, scattered about in hidden underground hideouts in the desert. The largest of these groups was called the Scavengers. Simple and unoriginal the name may have been, but by the small population of Jakku, they were feared and respected.

Rey had been sold to them twelve years ago by parents who didn’t care for her.

She was fifteen now and had been their slave ever since.

And she wasn’t the only one. There were plenty of other children, both girls and boys, who were slaves to the Scavengers, but, for whatever reason, she did seem to be the favorite.

If she were anywhere else, that might’ve been a good thing.

She turned a corner and froze instantly.

Halfway down the next hall was an open door. From her vantage point, she could see nothing of the interior of the room the door led to except a small shaft of light. Judging by its brightness and color, she guessed it was an oil lamp, most likely built by one of the other children in the hideout.

But it wasn’t the light that confused her or even the fallacy of an open door in the middle of a hall of closed ones.

It was the sounds coming from within the room itself.

The noises of the Scavengers, becoming frantic from hunger and anticipation of the dinner she would soon be cooking for them, were distant from where she was in the hideout and still she could hear the low babble of them from where she now stood. By comparison, the door her eyes were affixed to now was much closer. She should’ve been able to hear what was going on within more clearly than she could see it, but the noises were low, intelligible. They sounded like furious whispers. Maybe even those emitted by an angry or wounded animal.

It took her a moment to distinguish them as rhythmic gasps and grunts.

Rey’s fingers tightened around the edges of the wicker basket as her eyes widened slightly and her lips pressed into a thin shaking line. She felt herself go rigid, every hair on her body standing on end while simultaneously her hands began shaking. Every part of her was.

She knew what those sounds were.

She knew what they meant.

Her ankles twitched. Everything within her was screaming for her to turn on her heel and run back the way she’d come, dropping the laundry basket on the way if she must. Whatever was going on in that room, she didn’t want to see it, however briefly, didn’t want to hear it even less.

The sounds, she knew, would follow her long after she’d gotten away from their source.

But she couldn’t do that.

She still had a basket full of laundry to do.

If she went back the way she’d come without doing it, it would mean the beating of her life and being sent to bed without dinner.

It would mean experiencing those sounds for herself later that night – though, there was every chance that would happen anyway. It seemed that, unlike the beatings, the starvings, and the other punishments, that happened no matter how good she was.

Sometimes it happened _because_ of how good she was.

There was no way for her to win.

Her knuckles whitening as she tightened her grip further on the wicker basket, Rey began to move stiffly down the hall once more. It wasn’t until she was already halfway there that she realized, to her own disgust and horror, that her feet were not taking her down the hall, but to the door.

As much as she didn’t want to admit it, there some morbid part within her that wanted to see what was happening behind the walls of the open door.

Carefully, doing everything she could to keep quiet, she set the basket down on the floor next to her. Her fingers curled around the doorjamb and, sucking in a deep breath, she peered around the narrow corner to the room beyond.

What the room’s real purpose was, she didn’t know. She might’ve guessed it were an office if there were any reason for the Scavengers to need one. There was a desk and the oil lamp was on the desk, but the rest of the room appeared to be used for little more than storage. However, she didn’t have much time to register this beyond superficiality before she saw what she’d come for.

Bent over the desk was a tall boy, only a couple years older than her, with messy black hair and matching sunken eyes. Behind him was one of the Scavengers, one Rey recognized, though the boy’s countenance was foreign to her. The Scavenger was the one making the rhythmic grunts and gasps, moving in time with them. The boy was making small gasps of his own as well as whimpers, but, from the white knuckled grip the boy had on the edge of the desk, she could tell they came out on accident.

Both of their trousers were down around their ankles.

The Scavenger’s eyes were closed, his features twisting every now and then into expressions she couldn’t read, but she knew meant pleasure. One of the Scavenger’s hands was pressed against the boy’s neck, holding him in place. The other held the boy’s hip as he slammed his own hips over and over again against the boy’s rear, the slap of skin on skin ringing through the room each time.

The boy’s eyes were wide from what she could only guess were pain and shock. Every now and then his lips would twitch in a grimace before smoothing out again and something she could only describe as a hollow death mask took over.

His own method of survival, she guessed. She’d seen it before. On herself.

The realization made her wince.

“Ah Benjamin,” the Scavenger said, his voice coming out as a shuddering moan, “I miss when you’d scream for your mother.”

The Scavenger’s movements became more desperate, harder, his hips striking against the boy’s so hard that the slapping sound echoed through the room, out the door, and down the hall. In response, the boy’s face twisted into a grimace so severe that, this time, he couldn’t hide it.

Rey turned away to retch, shaking from repulsion.

When she turned back, she flinched.

The boy’s eyes were locked onto her face. He saw her. There was no mistaking it, no other explanation for the shameful redness that was creeping up his neck onto his cheeks.

The boy’s lips moved soundlessly as his eyes widened again and then began darting back and forth from Rey’s face to other parts of the room. She didn’t understand what he was doing or what this meant until his fingers, still curled around the desk, began pointing behind him in sharp, jerking movements: he was telling her leave.

At first, she remained frozen, her fingers still clutching the doorjamb, her feet seemingly rooted to the spot. She didn’t want to leave. She wanted to help him. She knew what this was. She knew what it felt like. She’d been on the receiving end of it plenty of times herself. How many times had she wished someone would rush in and rescue her from the torment?

And how many times had one of the other children appeared and been caught? How many times had it only gotten worse after they did? How many times had she been blamed for what others had or had not done?

Her fingers tightened around the doorjamb, her grip as white knuckled as the boy’s on the desk. Her jaw clenched and she grimaced, revealing gritted teeth.

The realization of her utter helplessness made her want to scream.

She turned from the room in a rush, the grimace still in place as she picked up the wicker basket as carefully as she’d set it down. She tiptoed the rest of the way along the hall with the open door, then turned the next corner and ran the rest of the way to the washroom. When she reached it, she dropped the wicker basket, slammed the wooden door shut with both hands, making the whole thing rattle against its hinges, before she slumped against it, gasping for air, her entire body shaking.

She had known for a long time what the Scavengers were capable of, had known it for as long as she could remember, in fact, but never had she seen or even heard of it happening to another child.

Rey was the favorite, this much she knew, and she took all of the agony that came with that as gracefully as possible – or at least tried to. But what she’d just seen went against everything she knew about every aspect of her life with the Scavengers the last twelve years.

If she were the favorite, what did it mean she’d seen one of the Scavengers using a boy she’d never seen before the same way she was used? Did it mean she was no longer the favorite? Or that he was simply the favorite boy as she was the favorite girl?

And more than that: how had she been able to feel his fear and his pain as if it were her own? How had she been able to see into his thoughts and know where he’d come from? That the reason she’d never seen him before was because he’d been a slave to one of the other gangs?

So many questions, none of which she had the answer to.

Blinking rapidly, struggling to hold back tears she couldn’t pinpoint the origin of, she looked up at the plastic domed skylight above her, dirty and covered in sand, but the only illumination in the tiny washroom that wasn’t much bigger than the bathrooms elsewhere in the hideout.

For a moment, she couldn’t figure out what she was doing here to begin with and then, very slowly, she remembered the wicker basket at her feet, now overturned, dirty clothes scattered about the floor around her feet.

She had laundry to do.

* * *

It had been a little over five years since Ben Solo had been sold by his mother to one of the scavenger gangs on Jakku. He knew why she’d done it: to protect him from his father, who’d been threatening to kill him, and from Snoke, who’d been threatening to come find him. He wasn’t sure if she really believed sending him to Jakku would keep him safe from Snoke (or his father, for that matter), but he _did_ know she hadn’t known what else to do and, by the time she _had_ sold him, she’d run out of options.

He’d been barely twelve then. He was just over seventeen now.

It would’ve been only too easy to blame her for all that he’d been put through since were it not for the simple fact that he knew she had no idea what kind of people the scavengers truly were. Cutthroats and thieves, maybe, but child molesters and rapists? No. His mother was too good of a person, too purehearted, to willingly sell her son to people she knew or even thought might hurt him.

But hurt him they had.

Over and over again.

Every single day of his life.

For the past five very long years.

For some reason, he’d thought, when he was sold to the Scavengers from the gang his mother had originally sold him to, that things might be different, that he might no longer be hurt, or at least not so constantly and severely, but this thought was wiped quickly from his mind when one of them – the one who’d sold him to the Scavengers to begin with – grabbed him by the back of his neck and strongarmed him down a deserted hallway to an old storage room and bent him over the desk within.

As he grimaced in pain, clutching at the edges of the desk to keep himself from whimpering or crying out, he realized just how foolish it was to ever have believed anything would be different from one gang to the next.

For the briefest of moments, Ben closed his eyes against the pain and when he opened them again, his gaze going back to the world beyond the door of the storage room that the Scavenger had left open, he saw the pale white face of a girl, peering around the corner of the doorjamb, her eyes wide, her own grip on the doorjamb as tight as his own on the desk.

Heat crept up his neck and into his cheeks at the shame of someone seeing him this way, but confusion quickly replaced the feeling.

What was she doing here? Why hadn’t she left as soon as she’d seen this?

Why could he feel her fear as if it were his own?

And how was it he could know as surely as he knew his own name that she’d not seen this before because she’d been on the receiving end of it?

None of it made any sense.

But if she were caught here...he didn’t want to think about what might happen then.

Frantically, his lips began moving, mouthing for her to go, to leave, before the Scavenger spotted her, but when she didn’t seem to understand this, he began pointing, his movements quick and stilted, down the hall, away from the storage room to...the washroom.

Where she’d been headed all along.

Again he was struck by the knowledge and wondered where on earth it came from.

When he blinked again, the girl was gone.

It took him a moment to register also that the Scavenger had finished with him.

He shuddered in disgust as he felt the man’s semen dripping down his leg.

“Clean up this mess and get back to the kitchens before Plutt wonders where you are,” the man spat at him, kicking the corner of the desk as he walked around Ben. Ben jumped as the desk jerked to one side, groaning as it skidded slightly across the duracrete floor. He waited until the Scavenger left the room before he slowly straightened, his leggings shaking violently and began to clean himself, using and staining his own clothes as he did.

The kitchens. He wanted to scream. He couldn’t cook. He’d never been able to. Why on earth was he being assigned to the kitchens? It had to be a ploy to get him to fail. It _had_ to be. There was no other reason they would put him somewhere they knew he had no skill with.

At once, he began going over the last week in his mind, trying to figure out what it was he had done wrong to deserve such a punishment. Nothing immediately came to mind, but that didn’t mean there was nothing. The Scavengers could find any sort of inconvenience a fatal transgression.

With a wince and a strangled cry of pain, Ben pulled up his pants. He braced himself against the desktop, his face set in a grimace, his eyes squeezed shut against the pain both mental and physical and his entire body shook violently.

How much more of this could he take?

How much more until his body gave out and his mind gave up?

 _Kill them,_ the familiar voice of Snoke, his tormentor since childhood, whispered in his head. _There are weapons everywhere. What’s stopping you? You have the strength. Do it. Do it now._

Ben let out a scream and the door slammed shut as the objects near the desk shot away from him, crashing against the duracrete walls, some of them shattering.

One of them was the oil lamp and instantly a fire was started on the cement floor in the puddle of oil pouring out of the broken glass, bright flames shooting up towards the gray ceiling.

Momentarily, he was frozen in shock, his eyes wide with fear as he stared at what he’d done. Then he swore loudly and began searching the room with his eyes for a way to extinguish the fire before it set upon anything else. There was a thick blanket folded atop a set of shelves and Ben, hardly having to stand on his toes to do so, pulled it down and threw it over the flames, stamping on it with his feet until only smoke hissed out from the edges.

He stood on the blanket, above the mess he’d made, his hands curled into trembling fists, staring at the messy splashes of oil, his chest heaving as he gasped.

No.

He wouldn’t kill the Scavengers. He _wouldn’t_.

He would _not_ become what Snoke wanted him to be.

He would die first.

* * *

It had been hours now since Rey had done the laundry, hours since it had dried, she’d gathered it back up, and given it back to those it belonged to. She’d spent the time since doing her other chores: sweeping the floors and then scrubbing them, cleaning the dining and living areas for that night’s guests, and cleaning the Scavengers’ bedrooms for whatever would come after.

She prayed tonight she wouldn’t know.

After she’d finished all of that, she’d been sent to the kitchens to begin making the feast that would serve the Scavengers and their friends. She knew why she was the main cook in the hideout. Simply put, she was the best at it. And she enjoyed it, though she never would’ve let them know this. In cooking, she was able to lose herself and forget, however briefly, where she was and who she was cooking for and what that all meant. It always came back once she got around to plating the food, but for the few hours during the time she was cooking, she forgot. And that was more than worth the pain of remembering all over again.

“Girl.”

The voice of Unkar Plutt, the man her parents had sold her to, the man who most often used her body for his pleasure, made Rey freeze in place, halfway between the spice cabinet and the stove.

She turned very slowly in his direction.

And froze all over again.

Standing next to Unkar Plutt was the boy she’d seen bent over the desk.

It was all she could do to keep her jaw from dropping.

“This boy will be helping you in the kitchen tonight,” Plutt said, either oblivious to her shock or ignoring it outright. “Make sure neither one of you burn any of our food.”

She forced herself to nod.

She waited until Plutt left to move again. And then it was only to turn away from the boy, back to the food on the stove. She pointed to the pot full of potatoes. She meant to tell him to watch it, to make sure it didn’t boil over, but she couldn’t seem to make herself speak, a problem she often with how little she spoke in general. It had gotten her into trouble more than once.

She could hear the boy’s footsteps on the duracrete, approaching the stove, his eyes fixated on the pot her finger was pointing to. She didn’t look at him except out of the corner of her eye.

There was so much she wanted to say to him and none of it would ever be enough.

_I’m sorry I saw. I’m sorry I ran away. I’m sorry_ _I didn’t help you_ _. I’m sorry. I’m sorry._

If only she could make herself speak.

Even if it didn’t do much good, it would do _something_.

She was still thinking about this when she, again, turned from the stove to head towards the spice cabinet, intent upon getting something to season the ground meat with.

As she passed the boy, her shoulder brushed his, something seemingly unremarkable, but it was anything but.

In an instant, in the fraction of a second it took for their shoulders to touch, she knew everything about him.

She knew his name ( _Ben Solo_ ) and the names of his parents ( _Han Solo and Leia Organa_ ). She knew how old he was ( _seventeen_ ) and how old he’d been when he’d been sent to live with the scavengers five years ago ( _twelve_ ). She knew why he’d been sent to live with them to begin with ( _his mother was afraid for him_ ). She knew about how they’d violated him as often as they’d violated her, that what she’d seen in the open room in the middle of some abandoned hall of the hideout was not an unusual occurrence or even a rare one. She saw how his father hadn’t been much better before his mother sold him. She saw every inch of his life leading up to this moment. She knew everything he’d ever felt, everything he’d ever seen, everything he’d ever hoped and dreamed for.

She knew about him and she knew that he knew everything about her.

For a moment, the two of them stared at the other, eyes wide, lips parted, struggling to take in everything they’d just seen.

Rey reached out with tentative shaking fingers.

They brushed the edges of his arm.

Then everything exploded.

* * *

Unkar Plutt found Ben wandering around the hideout, searching valiantly for the kitchens, but with no success. He didn’t believe that’s what he was doing when he found him, however, and backhanded him for going where he wasn’t supposed to without permission. What he’d thought Ben was really doing, Ben had no idea. It wasn’t like even if he stumbled upon any great secrets kept by the gang he’d have anyone to tell or anyway to tell anyone outside of the hideout itself.

Leading him through the winding maze of halls, Plutt took him to where he was supposed to be all along: the kitchen, and when Ben stepped through the curtain that served as the kitchen’s door, he nearly ran from the room all over again.

Standing before the stove, unmistakable, though he couldn’t yet see her face, was the girl from the storage room doorway. The girl who’d seen the unnamed Scavenger violating him.

She looked as horrified as he felt.

And the feeling only increased at Plutt’s stout and damning declaration: “This boy will be helping you in the kitchen tonight.”

Ben had known all along that would be his chore for the evening as well as his torment, but being next to the girl that had seen too much made it so very much worse.

As Plutt left, she regained her composure and turned to the stove, her back to him.

Ah. So she was ashamed of him.

Ben didn’t blame her.

Soundlessly, she pointed to a large covered pot on the stove. She said nothing, but her meaning was clear: make sure those don’t boil over. Stiltedly, he approached the pot, clutching one elbow, his eyes on her back the entire time.

Despite her clear and total dismissal of him, he was intrigued by her.

There was more to her than he knew, that much he could easily tell, but he didn’t have the faintest idea what that ‘more’ might have been.

Blinking, his gaze went to the pot he was supposed to be watching and he frowned in concentration, his brows knitting together as he did. Making sure it didn’t boil over shouldn’t be too difficult and he was determined to not mess this up.

But keeping his focus on the pot turned out to be a lot easier said than done. His thoughts kept wandering to the girl standing next to him, stirring something he couldn’t very well distinguish just in his peripheral vision.

She was beautiful. That much he knew for sure. She was pale and slender with long dark hair, tied up in three buns in a line down the center of her scalp. She had dark brown eyes and high arching brows. Even her hands were beautiful with long slender fingers and a square palm. And every expression she made seemed to compliment the rest of her face.

She wore the outfit all the slave children did: a simple white tunic and dark brown trousers that clung to her legs. She had boots of the same color.

He couldn’t help wondering how she felt about him too.

 _What good is there in you to think about?_ Snoke’s voice hissed in his ear. _You’re nothing. Nothing but evil and darkness. Why would a girl made of such pure light even_ think _about you?_

Ben grit his teeth, his hold on his elbow tightening.

He hated the voice for how much sense it made.

Without warning, the girl’s shoulder brushed his and Ben immediately turned to her, but it wasn’t her, he saw. It was everything hidden beneath the surface.

A thundercrack may as well have gone off from forceful the images that flooded his mind were:

A girl of no more than three screaming at the sky as a ship flew up into the blue atmosphere.

The same girl, now five, being violated by Unkar Plutt. And again. And again. And again. It happened over years and years and years.

The girl now being violated by more than just Unkar Plutt. There was a group of them. Ben counted twenty before he lost count.

He saw her being starved, beaten, raped countless times, and far worse things than that.

So stunned was he by the images that it took him a moment to realize that it was the girl in front of him ( _Rey_ , he knew her name now too) whose life he was seeing.

When the barrage of memories stopped, she staggered back from him and he stood, staring at her for several long moments, gasping, struggling to take in all he’d just seen.

Then he felt her fingers on his arm and everything changed.

In an instant, he no longer saw the beautiful, startled girl in front of him, but the scavengers, every single one of them that had taken him, hurt him, violated him.

He grimaced, barring his teeth at the apparition before him.

He would not be touched again.

His arm cocked back and he slammed his fist into the jaw of the scavenger before him.

Another thundercrack and he saw Rey, the girl whose life he’d just seen, flying across the room, skidding across the cement floor until she stopped, right up against the far wall. She lifted her head, her palms pressed into the ground beneath her, her chest heaving, her eyes wide, her lips parted only enough to let air in and out.

She was terrified of him.

Ben let out a _whoosh!_ of a breath, his own eyes widening, his lips slightly parted. He turned his gaze to his trembling palms, staring at them, seemingly in wonderment of how they could be capable of such violence, especially towards a girl so undeserving of it.

His fingers curled into fists and this time he pressed them against his eyes, a grimace settling onto his lips as he gasped out, crouching down, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you. I thought...you were someone else. I-I don’t like being touched. I’m sorry.”

How could he do that? He was a monster, just as bad as the Scavengers who had tormented her all her life. He had wanted to be her friend, maybe her protector, but he didn’t deserve to be any of that. He deserved the hatred she must surely feel for him now.

 _You see, my boy?_ Snoke said, his voice a soothing balm over the agony of these fresh wounds. _You’re not made for light. Light burns you. Come to the darkness. It will give you everything you have ever desired. It will give you what you deserve._

He wanted to argue, wanted to tell Snoke he was wrong, but, try as he might, he couldn’t find any way that he was anymore.

“Ben…”

The voice was soft, barely more than a whisper, but it was enough to make him look up.

Without making a sound, the girl had crawled from where she’d landed right over to him and was now sitting before him, one hand outstretched towards him, her fingers hesitating right before they reached his skin.

There was no fear in her eyes.

Only forgiveness.

Only, somehow, love.

It was inexplicable. How could she forgive him? How could she love him? There was nothing good about him! His own mother had sold him to his torturers. And, sure, she hadn’t known, but how could he _not_ blame her for that? And even if it weren’t her fault, his own father had wanted to kill him.

How could this girl who hardly knew him love him when his own father didn’t?

“Rey...”

He said her name just as softly as she’d said his. Like a prayer, a benediction.

Like the only thing that could save him from his life of torment.

They leaned in towards each other at the same time.

There was a sudden violent hissing from above them that made Ben blink, snapped out of his daze, and Rey jump.

Her face twisted into a mask of worry and anxiety as she shot to her feet, mumbling over and over again, “No, no, no, no, no.”

Ben stood as well, clutching his elbow again.

While they’d been distracted, the meat had begun to burn and, while he could see that most of it was salvageable despite the thick cloud of smoke that was emanating from the pan it was in, he knew that ‘most’ wouldn’t be enough for the Scavengers once they smelled the smoke.

“What the hell happened?”

Ben and Rey both jumped in unison this time, turning as they did.

Sure enough, there was Unkar Plutt, looking furious, his meaty hands balled into tight fists.

“We-we were just –” Rey began, but she was never given the chance to finish.

Plutt crossed the room in two massive strides and hit Rey, right on the jaw, right where Ben had moments earlier.

The sickening sound of skin against skin made him flinch.

Rey collapsed to the ground, scooting away from the man looming over her, letting out a cry of fear and pain as she did so.

“I did it! It was me!”

Plutt, his arm still raised, hesitated and turned to Ben.

Ben swallowed hard. The words had come out before he’d given it any real thought.

“You?” the man breathed out lumbering towards him.

Ben staggered back a few steps.

The blow made him see stars, snapping his head to one side and making him lose his footing.

He collapsed to the ground, only barely catching himself before he smacked his head against the viciously hard cement floor.

Ben’s head snapped back to Plutt’s instantly and he barred his teeth at him, determined to show no fear, only defiance, while the man – the _creature_ , if he thought too long about Rey’s memories – beat him. Probably to death.

He smirked. He would die smiling, protecting, not doing evil.

Not giving into the dark.

“No!”

The petrified cry rang out from across the room and Plutt turned as Ben’s eyes snapped to Rey’s face in the same instant.

“Please! It was me!”

Plutt started towards her again before hesitating and shouting, “It doesn’t _matter_ which one of you _did it_! The food was _both_ of your responsibility!”

Placing his fingers in his mouth, Plutt whistled. A moment later two other Scavengers that Ben didn’t recognize entered the kitchen.

“Take them both to the Dark Room. No dinner.”

Each of the Scavengers grabbed one of the children roughly by the upper arms, pulling them from the room and down the hall.

For just a moment before they left the kitchen, Ben’s and Rey’s eyes locked and something passed between them that was beyond conscious comprehension, beyond explanation through words.

All he knew was she was the other half of his soul. Any time he spent without her from now on, would be hollow, and to lose her would be detrimental to his body as well as his spirit.

_Dyad._

The word was quiet, echoing through his brain over and over again.

He knew what he meant, but he had never believed it possible.

Looking into Rey’s face now, however, he felt he could believe in anything.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you enjoyed that!! i really want to write more of this, but i'm not sure exactly what to do next. i want this to be told in three parts and take place over years. i actually have more ideas for the third part than the other two, but i need to write the other two parts to build up to the last part, which will be by far the most dramatic. 
> 
> anyway!! i hope you enjoy <3 please comment and leave kudos if you enjoy!!


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